text: In 1897, John Jacob Abel in Baltimore partially purified adrenal extracts to what he called “epinephrin”, and Otto von Fürth in Strasbourg to what he called “Suprarenin”. The Japanese chemist Jōkichi Takamine, who had set up his own laboratory in New York, invented an isolation procedure and obtained it in pure crystal form in 1901, and arranged for Parke-Davis to market it as ”Adrenalin”, spelt without the terminal “e”. In 1903, natural adrenaline was found to be optically active and levorotary. In 1905 synthesis of the racemate was achieved by Friedrich Stolz at Hoechst AG in Höchst (Frankfurt am Main) and by Henry Drysdale Dakin at the University of Leeds. In 1906 the chemical structure was elucidated by Ernst Joseph Friedmann (1877–1956) in Strasbourg, and in 1908 the dextrorotary enantiomer was shown to be almost inactive by Arthur Robertson Cushney (1866–1926) at the University of Michigan, leading him to conclude that ″the ‘receptive substance’ affected by adrenalin″ is able to discriminate between the optical isomers and, hence, itself optically active. Overall, 32 designations have been coined, of which “adrenaline”, preferred in the United Kingdom, and “epinephrine”, preferred in the United States, persist as generic names in the scientific literature.